The power system has to deal with three main sources of uncertainty: demand uncertainty and load prediction errors, failure of power plants and uncertainty of wind. The growing share of wind and other intermittent generation sources in the European supply increases the uncertainty about power...

Many countries tax voluntary pension savings using the so-called EET model, based on tax-deductible savings and taxable withdrawals. In Finland the tax reform of 2005 changed the tax rate schedule from progressive to proportional, while the basic structure of the EET model was retained. This...

Decentralized fiscal decision making is more likely to be optimal if regional tax bases are non-rival, in the sense that one region's gain is no other relevant region's loss. We develop a method for estimating the rivalness of tax bases using the underlying structures of the conditional logit,...

School failure has been one of the principal problems of the Spanish educational system during recent decades. This paper offers a perspective of the evolution of the factors that have had a significant influence over the risk of school failure considering personal, household and school...

This paper models the local tax mix determination process in the presence of state-wide tax limitations and shows how excess sensitivity of local public spending to grants (the conventionally and somewhat misleadingly called flypaper effect) arises in the endogenously generated constrained tax...

This paper explores for the first time the consequences of centrally imposed local tax limitations on the modelling and estimation of spatial auto-correlation in local fiscal policies, and compares three spatial interaction estimators: a) the conventional maximum likelihood estimator that...

It is well understood that the two most popular empirical models of location choice-conditional logit and Poisson - return identical coefficient estimates when the regressors are not individual specific. We show that these two models differ starkly in terms of their implied predictions. The...

The Zollverein, the 1834 customs union between independent German states, removed all internal borders. This paper investigates its economic impact focussing on urban population growth in the state of Saxony. Implications from a economic geography model are tested with a data set on town...

By raising commuting costs, an increase in gasoline prices should reduce the demand for housing in areas far from employment centers relative to locations closer to jobs. Using annual panel data on a large number of ZIP codes and municipalities from 1981 to 2008, we find that a 10 percent...

In 2000, wages of full time full year workers were more than 30 percent higher in metropolitan areas of over 1.5 million people than rural areas. The monotonic relationship between wages and city size is robust to controls for age, schooling and labor market experience. In this paper, we...